Trigg County was ranked in the state’s 20 top performing child support contracting officials during the past year, according to a release by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS).

It was announced last week that Trigg County Attorney H.B. Quinn’s office ranks sixth in the top performing counties with 1,000 or fewer cases for Fiscal Year 2008/2009, while Livingston County was ranked second and Crittenden County was ranked third.

Quinn said that while he’s glad his office is doing so well, he had originally thought that his office tries more than 1,000 cases a year, even as much as roughly 1,200 such cases per year.

“I don’t know how Frankfort counts them,” Quinn said.

For Quinn and his assistant Octavia Vinson, the hardest part of the job is getting those with delinquent child support payments to make those payments, whether they are simply refusing to pay or whether they can no longer afford to pay.

If a party who has been paying regular child support payments but has lost their job, Quinn or Vinson might argue for smaller payments, he said, adding that someone comes in every month to try to find unemployed parties jobs so they can continue to make such payments.

“You have to give them an incentive to pay,” said Quinn. “That’s the hardest part of the job.”

The report also stated that Hopkins County was ranked third among the top performing counties in the state with 2,000 – 4,000 cases.

The CHFS also ranked the Lyon County Attorney’s Office, as well as Lyon County Attorney Brandon Knoth, as showing the greatest improvement.

Contracting officials are ranked based on their performance with paternity establishments, the establishment of child support orders, child support collections and arrearage, or past due collections, the report said.

The statistics were announced early in November in Louisville at the Child Support Conference, which was sponsored by the CHFS Child Support Enforcement Program.

While Quinn wasn’t at the ceremony, Vinson, who Quinn called “an integral part of the process,” was there to receive Trigg’s award.